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Meta-Analysis Assignment

Each of you please answer the following questions on the class wiki as indicated, although I want you to “talk/collaborate” with one another in the class as you answer these questions.

1. What were the measures used in this study?

2. How did the researchers define “better”?

3. How did the researchers define “performance?

Note to Dr. McFadden, At least 10 of the classmates held a conference call online (3/9/2011) to discuss this topic. Some of us made comments below, and looked at other's answers when considering how to respond ourselves in an effort to "talk/collaborate." The recording of the online conference call did not take so we could not post it here to share with others and you like we'd hoped.

I knew that this information looked familiar - I couldn't put my finger on it at the time. Thanks for the refresher. Great idea and initiative to get the discussion started. I have more reading to do before I am READY to tackle the assignment. Very thought provoking comments though.

Page 17 of the document tells us they measured 50 independet effect sizes within 45 studies. Boy, that's a lot of measuring!

Getting a little deeper, though, we find that the study looked mainly at higher education and medical education classes that were either entirely online or blended. Strictly face-to-face was not a part of this meta-analysis (p. xii).

I need to read through the report when I'm not on so much pain medication...but right now it seems that "better" simply refers to the effect sizes they found when measuring grades of students in online classes versus blended classes.

p. 51 states that "all effects have been based on objective measures of learning" which leads me to believe the researchers were looking at grades of students in different online or blended classes to determine where higher grades showed enough of an effect size to say that one method was "better" or not.

Reading studies like this, everything starts to blend together. Am I missing something when I say that doc's terms of "better" and "performance" are not directly addressed in the study but only a relative term when regarding the outcome of the studies, being either "not significant" or resulted in "stronger learner outcomes"?

We had a great meeting tonight on Gotomeeting.com but unfortunately I did not record it right :( If someone remembers what we said maybe you can put up a note. I think what we basically came to the conclusion of on this is that the terms better and performance aren't really defined that clearly in this study. Although "better" seems to mean that based on the objective measurements (tests) that as long as the result was statistically better p>.05 then it was better. Performance means how they do on tests, and how the teachers teach their class???